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10 Percent of UK Sites Incompatible with Firefox
Bimo_Dude writes "The BBC News is reporting that ten percent of UK websites alienate Firefox users. From the article: 'While most people still use Microsoft's browser, Firefox is slowly making inroads. Its share of the browser market grew to 8% in May, up from 5.59% at the beginning of the year, according to US-based analysts NetApplications. Microsoft IE's share of the market dropped to 87.23% in May, compared to 90.31% in January.'"
Perhaps what they're really trying to say is that 10% of the sites are IE-specific, as if a site does not work in FireFox, it is unlikely to work in Safari, Opera, and other browsers. It's not a FireFox specific problem.
Except that if you code to W3C standards it will work in IE and Firefox and a whole lot more besides, so how does it cost more money?
On the site I work on, a major UK mobileco, we code to XHTML 1.0 now and browser compatiblity is usually a non-issue - in fact I find it easier to code using Firefox (with the utterly wonderful Web Developer extension) and then cross-check in IE.
We used to have far more headaches back when we had to provide backwards-compatibility with NS4.0, but now that the numbers of such users have dropped to single-digit numbers per month, we're XHTML all the way.
No, you are selling the website to the client, not thier customers. If the client is thinking in terms of pretty pictures instead of useability and robust technology, then you give them pretty pictures.
There are still plenty of retailers that havent got a clue about the market or the technology. boo.com was the classic example, but theres plenty of retailers that are happy to give every 10th customer a sharp poke in the eye. These retailers will always be at a disadvantage and will dissappear over time.
The last one I saw was Abel and Cole selling Organic Food. Last year they were on the Google first page for 'Organic Food UK' but now thier competitors are stealing thier market. Searching for 'Able and Cole' leads to the competition, thier website lists products by code rather than product name, they used to be unusable with Mozilla. I expect they will dissappear in a few years.
Other sites I find hard to use are:
Ebay/Paypal. It took me a week to get set up to sell something. Google or Amazon will overtake them because they understand 'easy to use'.
Dabs.com Havent used them for a year, but it was so hard to find technical info that I had to go to other retailers to find out about the product.
WarehouseExpress. Horrible site, only made useable by the price, range and because they arnt as bad as Jessops.
Jessops. Already seen a dive in shareprice. Expect them to be dead by next year.
**TODO** Steal someone elses sig.